The Ormeshers, and the roles they have played in West Lancashire life
THE surname Ormesher is a dialectal variant form of the place name “Ormshaw”, and describes a former inhabitant of this now “lost” medieval village in Lancashire. The derivation is from the NorseViking “ormr” translating as snake, serpent or dragon, plus “scaga”, a Shaw, the Middle English word for a wood or thicket.
The powerful and wealthy landowner Orme is likely to have been descended from the Dublin Vikings who landed on the West Lancashire coast in 930 having barely escaped Ireland with their lives. These Norsemen were refugees, or ‘Rymmers’, they wouldn’t have been wearing helmets with horns attached, that is a Victorian depiction inflicted on later generations with no grounding in truth.
Ormskirk has an enduring connection to those real Vikings.
The developed form as Ormsher or Ormshire may describe one who comes from or works at Ormshaw. The name is found in the Ormskirk district as Ormisher or Ormesher. Not all people with the name are necessarily related, even though the 18th and 19th century Ormeshers had big families.
One of the largest Ormesher families in the town was the family descended from Edward and Mary Ormesher née Whittle, who married at Up Holland in 1794. Edward was a native of Ormskirk and a weaver. At that time there were hundreds of weavers in Ormskirk working in their own homes in very unhealthy conditions.
The whole family would in some way contribute to the cottage industry and therefore, many of the infant children succumbed to respiratory conditions.
Of the nine children born to Edward and Mary between 1795 and 1814, two of the daughters, Mary and Alice, died aged 20 and 21 respectively. The family lived on Greetby Hill where almost every cottage in the early 1800s was the home and workshop of weavers.
Despite a large-purpose built factory existing from the 1790s to around 1830 in Burscough Street, the hand worked cottage cloth.
James Ormesher, eldest son of Edward and Mary born 1797 grew up on Greetby Hill and married Jane Balmer; he has six children and was also a silk weaver. They lived just a few doors away from Prospect Cottage. His daughters were silk weavers from their early teens but his sons went into different trades. All their children were baptised at the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel on Chapel Street in the 1820s and 30s.
Eldest son Edward Ormesher had done his apprenticeship with Richard Iddon in West Street, North Meols; he married Lathom born Alice Ashcroft in 1865 and took the premises at 4 Moor Street, establishing a successful boot and show makers shop. Edward and Alice had seven children in total but daughter Margaret died August 18, 1867, aged two; daughter Elizabeth died July 8, 1868, aged one; first-born son James William died Feb 27, 1870, aged just four months, daughter Jane died in August 1871 aged six months. When son Joseph arrived in 1872 he was their only living child. Daughter Jenny was born in 1880, followed by son Edward in 1881.
Sons Joseph and Edward started their working lives as apprentice boot-makers in their father’s shop. Daughter Jenny married a Yorkshire man, Perfect Alfred Ernest Emsley in 1904. Alfred, as he was known, had come to Ormskirk with his widowed mother and his spinster sisters who opened a bakers shop at 4 Burscough Street. Alfred’s sister Maria Elizabeth Emsley was the wife of British artist William Woodhouse and their son was the famous artist Ronald Basil Emsley Woodhouse. Jenny Emsley née Ormesher is buried with her father’s sister Ellen Pimblett in the Parish Church.
Joseph Ormesher started his working life as an apprentice to his father but he took a different path and became a professional organist, playing the organ at St Annes Parish Church for many years. His grandfather James Ormesher had loom weavers in their own making their played the organ at the funeral of the Reverend Henry Fogg in October 1886.
Joseph’s musical career saw him play on the stage of the Working Men’s Institute on Moor Street for a benefit concert hosted by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool (the Hon. William Oulton) to raise funds for the destitute minors after the Tawd Vale Colliery Disaster in 1898.
Joseph made his living from teaching the pianoforte and the organ too, and he taught his pupils at his home in Stanley Street.
Edward Ormesher’s brother was also Joseph. Whilst Edward made a success of his boot and shoe shop, Brother Joseph had an apprenticeship with a blacksmith but after he married Margaret Heslop and they took premises at 40 Moor Street on the Moor Street Bridge. Joseph ran a grocers’ shop and offered fresh cured bacon from the premises.
Joseph had a large family and his son Edward took over the shop at 40 Moor Street. The business carried on there well into the 1900s, Edward dying in 1947.
A son, Warrant Officer Joseph Donald, was killed in a flying accident in May 1945 whilst with the Royal Air force Volunteer Reserve.
He is buried with his parents in the Parish Church yard and remembered on the Grammar School Memorial, the Emmanuel Methodist Memorial and the Comrades Memorial in Coronation Park.
This branch of the family are not part of the Ormesher family that had Cross Hall or ran several pubs in the town, like the Greyhound and the new Eagle and Child, nor are they related to the Ormesher family of Asmall Lane.